A new research paper titled “AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance,” which was recently presented at the Conference on Language Modeling, has been attracting attention.
It explores an obvious question: do AI tools negatively affect your ability to think? It does so with a simple experimental design: participants were divided into two groups tasked with solving a series of math problems involving fractions. One group had to find answers on their own, while the other used ChatGPT to help.
At first, the ChatGPT group performed better, which is not surprising because LLMs are good at solving math problems. But then the researchers turned off the chatbot. Not only did the AI group’s accuracy fall below the control group, but many participants in the AI group gave up and started skipping questions altogether.
The researchers repeated the same experiment several more times, including one instance where math problems were replaced with an SAT reading comprehension prompt. They kept finding the same drop-offs in accuracy and persistence.
Here’s how a press release about the paper summarized these results:
“The findings backed up what anecdotes and surveys have increasingly found in recent years: An overreliance on AI for answers erodes our cognitive fitness. When AI produces answers in seconds, we get used to that speed; anything that takes longer feels inefficient.”
Brian Christian, one of the paper’s authors, put it plainly: “You almost couldn’t ask for a clearer story.”
I’ve spent the last decade thinking and writing about how technologies might accidentally degrade our cognitive fitness, and how this might in turn degrade not only our economic productivity, but also the quality of the human experience more generally.
In this sense, these LLM findings aren’t revealing something new.
What is new, however, is the jaw-dropping speed of these impacts. We’re accustomed to slow-moving techno-cognition trends such as the negative effects of ubiquitous smartphone usage, which took years to emerge in the data.
With chatbots, the negative impact is immediate. The high generated by side-stepping mental effort using LLMs is so compelling that, with only a short exposure, hard thinking quickly becomes intolerable.
The good news is that we don’t yet know if these effects are permanent. Presumably, the research participants who struggled immediately after ChatGPT was turned off might do much better on the same type of test if they tried again later in a setting where AI help was clearly not an option.
But we cannot ignore the warnings that these early studies are generating. When it comes to our cognitive fitness, we’re playing with a powerful new force that we don’t yet fully understand.
A key theme of my work in the technology critic space is that a life without serious, sustained, intentional thought is impoverished. Thinking is how we make sense of ourselves and the world, and is how we imagine new horizons and create the key elements of our future. It’s at the heart of philosophy, theology, and human empathy; the ability that separates our species from all other animals.
Silicon Valley is good at creating tools, but terrible at figuring out how we should use them. The latter step is still up to us — but it requires us to care.
